Conditions ill the Orient-Persecution in Russia - The limitation of the right of domicile - The brutality of expulsion - Limitations in education-Limitations in public service and liberal professions - The duty of military service - Chronic oppression – Pogroms - Rumania and the Jews - Violating the Berlin Treaty - A record of disabilities - Present position and outlook

The bondage of the Jews in Russia consists in a multiplicity of laws which rob them of all liberty in the choice of domicile and occupation, which cripple their opportunities of education, limit their right to own property, exclude them from State and municipal service, and impose heavy burdens upon them in regard to military duty. Cruel as all these restrictive laws are they are applied with such caprice and chicanery that the Jews are reduced to a condition of constant panic, from which they cannot always secure intervals of relief even by bribery; whilst the hostile attitude of the Government breeds a spirit of antagonism in the masses too, which finds vent in that diabolical product of Muscovite culture-the pogrom. Established in the dominions of the Tsar for more than two thousand years, ever since the destruction of the first Temple, the Jews have been the sport of a pitiless fate which has made them taste every form of human intolerance and State persecution. From the sixteenth century the dominant policy of the Government towards them has been one of hostility, relieved only by a few intervals of repose. Their oppression first assumed a serious form in the reign of Catherine I (1725-27), who issued a decree of expulsion; under Paul I (1796-1801) and Alexander I (1801-25), they enjoyed a spell of toleration; under Nicholas I (1825-55) the rod of persecution fell heavily upon them-systematic measures were adopted to force them to conversion, and boys from the age of eight were torn from their parents to become soldiers of the Tsar; under Alexander II (1855-81) they were again allowed to breathe freely and awaited the dawn of their emancipation, but after his assassination they were, under Alexander III plunged once more into the gloom of the medieval ages, which has settled about them even thicker and heavier during the reign of his son, Nicholas II, despite the mock Constitution proclaimed in 1904. At no period of their history were their hardships so numerous and so burdensome, so degrading and so hopeless, as at present. Let us examine their main features - a detailed survey would demand several volumes - and we may be able to appreciate something of the bitterness of the bondage imposed without shame or scruple by a modern Government upon its innocent subjects. 

The most harassing of all the laws that blast the lives of the Jews in Russia are those which limit their right of domicile and clog their liberty of movement. They are confined to a Pale of Settlement which was created in 1769, under the reign of Catherine II, and extended after the final partition of Poland in 1795, when another million Jews came under the iron hand of Russian rule. The Pale of Settlement, as it exists to-day, was substantially fixed in 1835 it comprises the ten governments or provinces of Poland and fifteen provinces of Lithuania, White Russia, South-Western and Southern Russia, the regions in which the great bulk of the Jews were concentrated and where they were decreed to remain. Later legislation also permitted the native Jews of Courland and parts of Livonia, of the Caucasus and Turkestan, to retain their domicile. By subsequent decrees the Pale of Settlement was curtailed: thus in 1887 the industrial district of Rostoff was cut off, and a few years later the health-resort of Yalta was also declared to be outside the permitted area. The Pale forms about a twenty-fourth of the area of the Russian Empire, whilst the Jews form an almost similar proportion (4.13 per cent) of the total population. The area assigned for Jewish residence, however, is much smaller than that contained within the boundaries of the Pale, for since May 1882, according to the so-called Temporary May Laws of Count Ignatieff, no further Jews were allowed to settle in the villages in the Pale, and once a Jew left his village he could not return to it or settle in another village and was thus compelled to remove to a town. Moreover, many townlets were later converted, by a mere stroke of a governor's pen, into villages, and thus involved the expulsion of the Jew. The consequence is that fully 95 per cent of the Jews in Russia are crowded into the towns of the Pale, forming as much as two-thirds of the population in many districts, where they are compelled to struggle against all manner of economic evils to keep body and soul together. 

The small percentage who are privileged to live in any part of the Empire according to the liberal laws of Alexander II, belong to the following four categories: - 

(1) Discharged soldiers, after serving their full time; 

(2) merchants of the first Guild (paying a business licence of 800 to 1000 roubles) after having paid that tax within the Pale for five consecutive years, and if they still belong to the first Guild after settling outside the Pale (according to the law also, the merchants may each take with them one Jewish clerk and domestic servants up to four persons); 

(3) graduates of universities and higher institutions of learning in general, as well as students of these institutions, apothecaries and apothecaries' assistants, certificated dentists, non-graduate surgeons, and midwives with their respective assistants and students in these branches; 

(4) mechanics, distillers, brewers, and artisans generally while pursuing their own callings, as well as artisans' apprentices serving their time, but in order to obtain passport, which has to be renewed periodically, they must produce a certificate of their vocation in accordance with the rules established by law for that purpose." ² The privileges accorded to these various classes, however, have, since 1882, been considerably curtailed and even rendered nugatory by harsh interpretations of the laws on the part of the Central Government and the provincial Governors, as well as by reason of the despotic action of the local police. Thus, in 1885, the privilege of the discharged soldiers was declared to be limited to the "Nicholas" soldiers, namely, those who had served prior to 1874, a class that is dying out; and hence the 18,000 Jewish soldiers who are drafted into the Russian army every year must go back to the Pale after completing several years' service, and are even forbidden to spend their leave outside its borders - a prohibition that makes most of them forgo their furlough. The law which permitted the merchants to "take with them" Jewish clerks was capriciously interpreted later to mean that no merchant had a right to employ clerks who had not actually accompanied him on his removal from the Pale to the interior provinces, and thus hundreds of Jewish clerks appointed later were torn from their positions and banished back to the Pale, whilst the merchants were allowed only one or two clerks - an absurdly small number in relation to their business. The members of the academic category were also subjected to various disqualifications. Graduates who had obtained their degree abroad were not allowed to live outside the Pale, whilst students at a Russian university were only permitted to live in their own university town. Female private teachers, not being specifically mentioned in the law, are refused the universal right of residence, and surgeons, dentists, and midwives, who do not actually exercise their profession - whether because of infirmity or because they have found a better opening - must return to the Pale. Artisans are subjected to even harsher regulations. Not only must they furnish themselves with certificates of proficiency in their craft, which are dear and difficult to get, but they are placed under supervision to ensure that they practise their trade, they are allowed to live in the interior provinces only 50 long as they exercise their trade, they must not sell any articles not directly connected with their handicraft nor sell their own products outside their town, and they must not give a night's shelter to any non-privileged person even a near relative. If they wish to exchange their trade they must go back to the Pale to qualify over again, a process that means heavy expense, long delay, and a ruinous holiday; when they become old and infirm and can no longer work they lose their right of residence; and if an artisan dies at his work and his wife is unable to carry on his trade, she and her children are driven back to the Pale. Moreover, many trades have been struck off the privileged list during the last thirty years, such as tobacco-workers, fish-curers, stonemasons, carpenters, butchers, etc., and even the privileged artisan is now denied access to vast regions of the Empire - the Don Territory, Yalta, the government of Moscow, Siberia, and part of the Caucasus. How grudgingly the Government allows even these few privileged classes to live outside the Pale is seen in the inhuman provision which permits children to remain with their parents only until they come of age and then compels them either to qualify independently or else to wander back alone to the Pale. Similarly, a married daughter whose husband has no right to live outside the Pale forfeits the right to visit her parents in the interior provinces. Still worse, the children of a certificated midwife are not allowed to live with their mother beyond the Pale unless their father also possesses the privilege independently. The Russian Government has the same fear of infants as the Pharaoh "who knew not Joseph." It is also as has already been observed, very severe towards women, who find it more difficult than men to acquire an independent privilege of residence. To only one class of women is the entire Russian Empire open - the prostitute: an exception that throws a lurid light upon the moral calibre of the Russian legislator. And should a Jewess take the prostitute's "yellow ticket" - happily a rare phenomenon - with the object of pursuing her studies or teaching outside the Pale, she is reprimanded for not following her "certified profession" and is sent back home for "transgressing the law." The restrictions of residence are also extended to foreign Jews. Any foreign Jew who is the representative of a recognized commercial firm may obtain permission through a Russian consulate to dwell in Russia three months; but all other foreign Jews who wish to visit Russia, whether for private reasons or in order to attend a scientific congress, must procure the special authorization of the Minister of the Interior, which is in most cases refused or granted only under humiliating conditions.³ 

The measures adopted by the Government and the local authorities to enforce all these restrictions are marked by wanton brutality. Orders are periodically sent from St. Petersburg or from some provincial centre to investigate the residential rights of Jews in particular towns, and they are carried out by the local police with a zeal that knows no shame. The police seize Jews in the streets, force their way into their homes, and, worst of all, make midnight raids, dragging men and women, old and young, out of their beds to see whether they are committing the crime of living out-side the Pale without the legal permit. Woe betide those who are found guilty, for they are generally marched like convicts through the streets in the early morning, denied any opportunity of winding up their affairs, and forced back to the Pale.⁴ Thus were 5000 Jews expelled from Kieff in 1910, and thus were hundreds of families expelled from their homes in Siberia in all the severity of mid-winter (1909-10). Even the sick are not spared, and the ailing Jews and Jewesses who are discovered at Yalta, or Piatigorsk, or at any other of the protected health-resorts, are summarily expelled with the risk of endangering their lives. Thousands of Jews are thus irretrievably ruined in health and in business year after year; and those who remain in the interior provinces are enveloped in an atmosphere of dread and try to buy repose and protection by bribing the police. It has been estimated that from two to, two and a half million pounds sterling are levied every year by the police from the Jews for their "protection," a sufficiently valuable reason why the Russian bureaucracy is opposed to the emancipation of, the Jews. 

Another fertile source of oppression is the restriction of opportunity in regard to education. Since 1886 the admission of the Jews to secondary schools and universities has been limited to 10 per cent of the register within the Pale and 5 per cent without it, except in St. Petersburg and Moscow, where the limit is fixed at 3 per cent. Jewish pupils are admitted to commercial schools only in a ratio equal to that of the Jewish merchants paying the Guild taxes, by means of which the schools are maintained; whilst they are wholly excluded from important technical institutions. Under Nicholas I and Alexander II the Russian Government urged the Jews to attend the State schools, as they were then largely opposed to secular learning; now that Jews show an avidity for modern education the Government tries to paralyze their aspirations, and even forbids the teaching of Russian in private Hebrew schools. Beyond the Pale there are comparatively few to make use of the 5 per cent rule, and within it the eagerness to be included within the limited 10 per cent compels youths to cram desperately for the qualifying examination and makes their parents resort to the bribery of headmasters and teachers. Failure is often followed by tragedy.⁵ Jewish parents are even known to pay for the education of additional Christian pupils so as to create extra places for their own children. The widespread difficulty of getting into the universities, however, forces hundreds of students - men and women - every year to migrate to universities abroad, where through lack of means, ignorance of the vernacular, and inability to earn anything in their leisure, they are often reduced to penury. Over 4000 Russian students are now at foreign universities, and the great majority, who are in Germany, have been afflicted with a further hardship, as several German universities have also adopted the principle of limiting the attendance of Russian Jewish students. This anti-Jewish movement has also spread to some universities in Austria and Switzerland. Even after graduating abroad the Jew must submit to another examination on his return to Russia, in order to obtain recognition of his diploma. 

The policy of suppressing the Jews as an intellectual an economic factor is rigorously applied in their exclusion from State and municipal service in their limitation in the liberal professions, and the restriction of their right to own property. The few isolated cases of Jews in Government service are due to special and fortuitous circumstances; for the great bulk of university-trained Jews there can be no appointment without baptism. They are not employed in the police service except as spies and informers: thus are their talents prostituted to the ends of a despotic bureaucracy, which then has a plausible pretext to abuse them. They are excluded from the bench, from appointments in schools and universities, and from the railway and post office departments. Since 1881 they have been limited to 5 per cent of the army surgeons, but upon the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War hundreds of Jewish surgeons were torn away from their civil practice, sent off to the most dangerous positions in the theatre of war, and curtly dismissed after the conclusion of peace. Jews can neither elect councillors of the municipality nor be elected to such positions, but the governors in the Pale may "at their pleasure" appoint several Jewish representatives, not exceeding a tenth of the corporation - a humiliating concession that is spurned by self-respecting Jews. They are also excluded from the Zemstvos (rural assemblies), limited to one-third of the members of stock exchanges and produce exchanges, and altogether forbidden to act as brokers in certain corn exchanges where the trade is mainly in Jewish hands. Shut out from the civil service, Jews of academic education find scanty openings even in the legal and teaching professions. They cannot be called to the bar or qualify as solicitors without the special permission of the Minister of Justice, which is very rarely given; and they are even forbidden to give private instruction in non-Jewish families. Moreover, since 1882, Jews are prohibited to buy or rent land beyond the precincts of a town, a prohibition that has utterly crippled the attempts to create a Jewish peasantry. Even in the Jewish agricultural colonies founded by the Government itself, where large tracts are of poor quality, they are not allowed to buy or lease additional land, and although many colonies are thus faced by gradual ruin the anti-Semitic press taunts the Jews with an aversion for agriculture. 

Deprived of all elementary rights and placed under constant surveillance like convicts on parole, the hapless Jews must help in the defense of their cruel fatherland ever in greater measure than the Christians. According to the census of 1897 they furnished 20.6 per cent more soldiers to the Russian army than their quota, and in 1902-3 they furnished from 35 to 37 per cent more. According to their ratio to the total population they should provide not more than 13,500 conscripts annually, but in recent years they have been made to supply from 17,000 to 18,000 every year. This disproportion is due to the fact that the Russian authorities deliberately ignore the immense Jewish emigration, which even in years of calm amounts to 50,000, and likewise fail to take into account the incomplete registration of Jewish deaths. For every Jew who fails to report himself for military service the Government exacts from his family a fine of 300 roubles (£30). The desired conscript may have died or emigrated or deserted the Jewish fold: it is all one - the fine must be paid. Thousands of Jewish families have been reduced to beggary by this barbarous extortion, but the Russian Government, which has already benefited to the extent of £5,000,000 by this medieval system of spoliation, knows neither justice nor pity.⁶ And yet, although the Jews are so much sought after as soldiers, they are treated in the army with every mark of degradation. They are excluded from the military schools, from all commissions, and even from the rank of sergeant-major; they are shut out from the guards and the navy, from the frontier and quarantine service; they may not form more than a third of the musicians in a military band, and they are forbidden to conduct it. But when war breaks out they must supply a relatively larger contingent for the troops than any other nationality, and the regiments with the biggest proportion of Jewish soldiers are sent to the most dangerous positions. In the Crimean War the Christian population in the western provinces of Russia supplied 19 soldiers per 1000, and in the eastern provinces 9 per 1000, while the Jews had to furnish 30 per 1000.⁷ In the Russo-Japanese War there were 40,000 Jewish soldiers, many of whom, on their return, found their homes a prey to the pogrom fiends. 

The foregoing account of the disabilities of the Jews in Russia represents but a tithe of their sufferings. The oppressive laws have been narrated here with some attempt at sequence and consistency, but as they have been issued at different periods and by different authorities, and as they are frequently marked by an ambiguity of phrasing, they are often erroneously and illegally applied and thus inflict hardship even upon those who, according to Russia's medieval code of justice, should be immune from annoyance. For the enforcement of the laws rests with the provincial Governors, desirous of securing promotion by evincing an excess of zeal, and with the local police, who are by no means punctilious about either the technicalities of the law or considerations of humanity. Repeated appeals are consequently made to the Central Government in St Petersburg, but the decisions, which are delayed for months and even years, are seldom in favour of the Jews. Since 1881 over 3000 interpretations of the anti-Jewish laws have been issued by the Ruling Senate, and every year adds to their number. It was in 1881 that the present era of barbarous legislation started upon its destructive course, the climax of which it would be difficult to predict, for every week, nay every day, brings some fresh story of Jewish wrong.⁸ There have, indeed, been Russian statesmen who have favoured the removal of the heavy yoke, but their mere espousal of the Jewish cause has sufficed to render them impotent for good. In 1882 Count Pahlen's Commission reported in favour of the gradual and complete emancipation of the Jews, but the same year witnessed a tightening of their bonds. In October 1905, M. Witte recommended "the necessity of equalizing the civil rights of all Russian subjects without distinction of nationality or faith," and in the same month broke out that epidemic of pogroms which raged with brief intervals all over the country for nearly a year. Even a circular issued by M. Stolypin in 1907 to legalize the residence of non-privileged Jews already settled outside the Pale, provided they were not politically objectionable, was twisted into a weapon of attack against those Jews who were actually in possession of the domiciliary privilege, on the ground that they were inimical to the social order. On this trumpery charge thousands have been banished, even infants and greybeards, from a host of towns in all parts of the Empire. But more horrifying than all these expulsions and barbarous decrees are the pogroms that have made Russia an inferno for the Jews, plunging them into a veritable saturnalia of robbery, rape, murder, desecration of synagogues, and wholesale demolition of property, in which bloodthirsty hooligans are instigated by the civil authorities and aided by the military and police.⁹ These pogroms first became a familiar feature in the years, 1881-83, when 224 broke out in South Russia and Poland, despoiling 70,000 poor Jews of their belongings, and inflicting a loss of nearly 11 million roubles (about £1,100,000). Further massacres took place in 1891, 1892, and 1903, but the most devastating of all were the pogroms of October 1905, when as many as 72.5 places were the scenes of riot, rape, and bloodshed, whereby over 200,000 Jews suffered a direct loss of nearly 63 million roubles (£6,300,000), whilst in. the riots extending from October 1905 to September 1906, over 1000 Jews were killed and 7000-8000 were wounded, the total material loss amounting to 66 million roubles (£6,600,000) apart from the incalculable economic damage of an indirect nature. And in addition to this long succession of misfortunes the Jews have constantly to suffer from an unfair administration of justice, to see their assailants acquitted by biased judges, and to be put upon trial themselves on some trumpery or legendary charge, such as the harbouring of a non-privileged relative in a house outside the Pale, the collecting of money for Jewish colonization in Palestine, or the alleged murder of a Christian child for the use of his blood in the Passover ritual. Unfounded as this "ritual murder" charge has always been, it has become one of the deadliest weapons in the arsenal of the Russian Anti-Semitism, and is produced almost without fail on the eve of every Passover to do its mischievous work. The most recent occasion on which this calumny was advanced, was on the murder of the boy Andrew Yuschinsky, in Kieff, on 12th March 1911, when an. innocent Jew, Mendel Beilis, was made its victim; and although the most eminent men-statesmen and theologians, politicians and professors, scientists and authors - in England, France, Germany, and even Russia itself,¹⁰ repudiated the charge as a malicious and superstitious libel, the Russian Government made desperate efforts to prove it, and kept Beilis in prison for two and a half years, though it was compelled to release him at last upon his being found innocent after a trial lasting a month. What wonder, therefore, if the radical solution of the Russo-Jewish question propounded by that unholy Procurator of the Holy Synod, Pobiedonostzev, whom Mommsen called "a resurrected Torquemada," is apparently being realized? The solution of that arch-enemy of Israel was that one-third of the Jews should be forced to emigrate, one-third should be absorbed into the bosom of the Church, and the remaining third should perish of hunger. During the last thirty years two million Jews have emigrated; thousands, especially among the educated circles, have baptized themselves; and pauperism has spread to such an alarming degree that from one-fifth to one-third of the Jews in different towns are now dependent upon charity. The great majority of those who remain in Russian captivity are unable to raise the fare to a land of refuge, and they face the future in a spirit of stoicism steeled by the untold calamities of the past. The future is overhung with the blackest clouds, for all the reactionary forces in the various forms of Nationalism, Clericalism, "Real Russianism," and Pan-Slavism, apart from the old-established bureaucratic despotism, are in the ascendant; and in addition to all their official persecutors the Jews in Poland are now subjected to a systematic economic boycott - the irony of it all! - by oppressed Poles, which is calculated to crush out of them any remaining spark of vitality. 

The plight of the quarter of a million Jews in Rumania is in several respects even worse than that of their brethren in Russia, and affords a striking example of the duplicity of a modern State. Settled in the country for more than fifteen hundred years-long before the advent of the Roman convicts who were introduced by Trajan to populate the fertile land of the Dacians - the Jews are treated as outlaws and subjected to a mass of harassing and humiliating restrictions despite the solemn Treaty obligation entered into by Rumania in 1878. The Berlin Treaty, by Article 44, made it a prime condition of the independence of Rumania that difference of religious belief should not preclude anyone from the enjoyment of civil and political rights, admission to public offices and honours, or the exercise of various professions and industries. In other words, the signatory Powers demanded the complete civil and political emancipation of the Jews in Rumania. Their action was due to the merciless persecution of the Jews which had become a European scandal. The Jews were treated as aliens incapable of naturalization, they were denied all freedom of economic activity, and they were driven from the villages into the towns where they were exposed to riots and massacres, where their homes were plundered, and their synagogues polluted and demolished. The Powers therefore wished to secure respect for the elements of humanity in return for the sovereign independence which Rumania sought. The Treaty of Berlin also required the bestowal of civil and political equality upon the Jews in Bulgaria, Servia, and Turkey, an act which these countries readily conceded. But the Rumanian Government protested that the immediate emancipation of its Jewish subjects would be a peril to the State and proposed an alternative to Article 44. This alternative had such apparent resemblance to the original Article that the Powers in their innocence accepted it, for it declared explicitly "Difference in religious beliefs and confessions does not constitute in Rumania an obstacle to the obtainment of civil and political rights, nor to the exercise of these rights," and it was followed by the reassuring stipulation: "A foreigner, without distinction of religion, and whether a subject or not of a foreign Government, can become naturalized under the following conditions." The principal conditions were that the foreigner should address to the Government an application for naturalization and reside for the next ten years in the country, to prove he was of service to it, and that naturalization could only be granted by law - that is, by Act of Parliament - and individually. As the principle of civil and religious equality was practically retained in this revised article, the Powers, after the dispersal of the Berlin Congress, agreed to accept it in lieu of Article 44, on condition that it was made part of the Constitution. To this Rumania, with a pretence of magnanimity, submitted, and Lord Salisbury expressed the hope that it would bring matters "into exact conformity with the spirit of the Treaty of Berlin." Little did the Powers dream that their confidence would be shamefully abused and that Rumania would cunningly extricate itself from its solemn contract. 

To prove that it did not violate the principle of religious equality and at the same time to keep its Jewish subjects in bondage the Rumanian Government brazenly declared all the Jews in the country to be foreigners, whose status could only be improved by the laws pertaining to the naturalization of foreigners. In vain was it pointed out that the Jews had been settled in the country uninterruptedly for more than fifteen centuries and had shed their blood in its defense. The Government insisted upon regarding its native Jewish subjects as aliens, though they were under the protection of no other State, and more than one statesman boasted of the trick that had been played upon the diplomatists of Europe. A pretence was made of emancipating the Jews by naturalizing in a body the 883 Jewish soldiers who had fought in the war against Turkey, but most of them had not survived to enjoy the honour. After this impressive display of generosity the Government, in 1880, naturalized another fifty-seven native Jews, but since then a steadily diminishing number has been admitted to the rights of citizenship, the total within the last thirty-five years hardly exceeding 200. Every year the Government submits the names of a list of Jews to each Chamber, but takes care that only a small proportion shall be passed by both Chambers, whose joint ratification is necessary for complete naturalization. But the Jews are not even treated as ordinary foreigners, who can invoke the protection of their home Government. They are legally described as "persons under Rumanian protection," but this protection has manifested itself in a series of oppressive laws, mostly enacted during the last thirty years, which are designed to force them to emigrate or to reduce them to starvation. Virtually, therefore, they are outlaws. The only exception consists of a part of the Jews who lived in the Dobrudja before it was ceded by Turkey to Rumania after the Russo-Turkish War in compensation for Rumania's cession of Bessarabia to Russia. The Jews in the Dobrudja who, before 11th April 1878, were Ottoman subjects, were promised the rights of Rumanian citizenship by the rescript ratifying the annexation; but these rights were not granted by law until 9th April 1909, and they were confined only to those Jews who could prove by documentary evidence that they had formerly been Ottoman subjects. 

The native Jews in Rumania are not allowed to own land or even to till it as hired labourers. They have been expelled from the rural districts and driven into the towns where most of the avenues to an honest living are closed to them. They are excluded from the civil service and from the medical, legal, and teaching professions. They may not form more than a fourth of the workmen or staff in any factory applying for the Government benefits without which industry in Rumania cannot flourish; whilst Jewish factories are wholly denied such benefits. Their economic plight is aggravated by their forced idleness one-third of the year, for Jewish shops, factories, and workshops, apart from observing the Jewish Sabbaths and festivals on sixty-five days of the year, must also close on Sundays and about a dozen Church festivals. Jewish merchants who have to visit a rural district on business are placed under police supervision to prevent them from coming into contact with the villagers, who might be enlightened as to the true cause of their permanent distress-absentee landlordism and Government indifference. The road to education is also barred. Jews are excluded from the secondary schools and universities, and even those who contrive to be admitted to university examinations are usually "ploughed," by anti-Semitic professors,¹¹ who show a surprising leniency to Christian students. Jewish students of medicine who obtain their doctorate diplomas at foreign universities are not allowed to practise in their native country, which is notoriously short of qualified doctors. Jewish children are not admitted into the public free schools until accommodation has been found for all Christian children, and then only after the payment of exorbitant fees. And yet the Government interferes in the management of the private schools which the Jewish communities must needs establish, frequently disapproving of the appointment of Jewish teachers and foisting upon them Christian teachers. Denied all rights of citizenship, the Jews, with their reduced earning capacity, must nevertheless discharge its duties they must pay taxes and - foreigners as they are declared to be - they must serve in the army, although they cannot rise to the rank even of a mere corporal. But more degrading than all these disabilities is the gruesome ceremonial of the oath which they are compelled to take when engaged in litigation with Christians. This sacramentum more Judaico, which has been in force since 1844, is marked by the fanaticism of the Middle Ages to which it owes its origin and is utterly repulsive to human reason. The Jewish litigant is wrapped in a shroud, placed into a coffin, and laid out in the synagogue, where the Rabbi, in the presence of a mixed congregation of indignant Jews and scoffing officials, utters a curse threatening all manner of loathsome diseases against the living corpse and his descendants should he not speak the truth, and the corpse must repeat every word of the malediction or lose his case. This barbarous ceremonial has on several occasions been declared illegal by the Supreme Court of Justice and the Court of Cassation, but it is still enforced by local courts which condemn the Jew who refuses to submit to it. Not until an Act of Parliament abolishes it will this abominable stain be removed from Rumania's code of persecution. 

The hostility of the Government has a contagious and demoralizing effect upon all classes and sections of the population - judges and bishops, politicians and professors, students and peasants. A judge in a Jassy law-court publicly stigmatized the Jews as vagabonds in a case affecting a respectable Jewish merchant of thirty years' standing and Bishop Nifon of the Lower Danube, in a pastoral screed printed in the Bucharest press, accused them of trying to seduce the common people from their ancestral religion.¹² The peasants who are naturally well disposed towards the Jews, and of whom 75 per cent are illiterate, are impregnated with Anti-Semitism by the village teachers, who read to them choice extracts from bigoted newspapers at their evening gatherings. The peasants have frequently protested against the banishment of the Jews from the villages, but the Government is merciless, sparing neither reservists nor even the sick, who can be driven from their homes at twenty-four hours' notice. Nor does it matter whether the Government is composed of Conservatives or Liberals, for they are both agreed in this policy of oppression and in defying the Treaty to which their country owes its independence. The result of this policy, which aims at reducing the Jews to economic ruin, has been a constant migration to lands of liberty, primarily to England and America. From 1899 to 1907, according to the Moniteur Officiel, some 55,000 refugees left for the United States alone. The high tide in this flow of emigration was reached in 1902, when the American Secretary of State, John Hay, fearing that economic troubles might arise from the sudden influx, addressed a Note to the Powers signatory to the Treaty of Berlin, urging them to make the Rumanian Government comply with its pledge. The British Government seconded the Note, but the other Powers were restrained by political interests from enforcing the lesson of humanity they had vainly tried to administer a quarter of a century before, and Rumania was thus left unchecked in its career of persecution. The only effect of America's well-meant intervention was that the Rumanian Government stopped issuing passports to Jews so that the complaints about their invading other countries might cease, and hundreds who had already sold up their homes and eagerly looked forward to reaching a peaceful haven in a few days were doomed to remain in their cruel fatherland. All subsequent attempts to bring moral suasion to bear upon the Government, whether from within or without, have proved equally futile. The most recent occasion has been in connexion with the cession of the new Dobrudja by Bulgaria to Rumania as part of the Balkan War settlement, a territorial change that naturally aroused the fear that the free Jewish citizens of Silistria and Baltshik would be reduced to the bondage of their fellow Jews in the rest of Rumania. The Rumanian Minister in London published an assurance in the Jewish Chronicle ¹³ that the Jews who came under Rumanian rule would enjoy the same civil and religious equality as before, but the Bill for the administration of the new Dobrudja, which has been drafted by the Rumanian Government, offers Bulgaria's former subjects only a modified sort of equality. The new citizens of Rumania will be able to acquire only a limited amount of land, and only in the annexed territory; and they will be deprived of Parliamentary representation, which they had enjoyed for more than thirty years under Bulgarian rule, and likewise of local self-government.¹⁴ 

The Jews of the new Dobrudja, however, may consider their lot as fortunate in comparison with that of their brethren in the older part of the kingdom, for these have no prospect whatsoever of the removal of their disabilities. The 15,000 Jewish soldiers who took part in Rumania's bloodless campaign against Bulgaria were promised enfranchisement by Ministers of the late Government,¹⁵ but there is no indication that this promise will ever be realized, and hence hundreds of disappointed Jewish reservists, with their families, have left the country in disgust. It had, indeed, been hoped that the provisions of the Treaty of Berlin, which ensure the equal rights of religious or national minorities, would be reaffirmed in connexion with the recognition of the territorial changes consequent upon the Balkan War. But the Powers, as announced in the House of Commons,¹⁶ are not agreed upon the question of reaffirmation, even though this was to be applied only to the newly annexed territories; nor could one have expected them to agree, for how can Russia read Rumania a lesson in tolerance? Thus, although the British Government has chivalrously declared that it will recognize the annexations only of the States that grant equal rights to religious or national minorities, the Powers have allowed a unique opportunity to slip for exacting from Rumania the redemption of the promise to which she owes her independence, and the bondage of the Jews in Rumania is likely to continue for years a blot upon the civilization of Europe. 

¹ A moving description of the sufferings of these Jews in South Arabia, settled there for over two thousand years, is given in a pamphlet, The Yemenite Jews, by Joshua Feldmann (Speaight & Sons, 1913), who describes their recent emigration to Palestine. 

² The Legal Sufferings of the Jews in Russia, edited by Lucien Wolf, p.31 (T. Fisher Unwin, 1912). This is the latest and best survey of the Jewish disabilities in Russia, and forms the principal authority for the present account. 

³ In 1911, Mr. Oscar Straus, then United States Ambassador in Constantinople, wished to visit Russia, but as the requisite document was worded in an unusual manner he abandoned the projected journey. Furthermore, a British officer, ordered by his War Office to the Far East, was refused permission to travel by the Siberian Railway because he was a Jew (Legal Sufferings of the Jews in Russia, p. 73). In November 1913, Dr. Georg Brandes was also refused permission to visit Russia for a lecturing engagement. 

⁴ The technical term for such "drives" is oblava. 

⁵ "In Wilna the son of the advocate Schmerling has committed suicide by throwing himself out of the window of the third story because, after waiting for two years, he was refused admission to the University by reason of the percentage norm" (Hilfsverein Report, 1911, p.123). Since last February, by an order of M. Kasso, the Minister of Instruction, the admission of Jews to Universities must be decided by lots, a cunning device for depriving them of all incentive. 

⁶ The following typical episode is related in the Vossische Zeitung of 30th March 1913: "In the year 1908 the eleven-year-old son of a Jew named Manela, who removed from Kielce to Lodz, was summoned by the Military commission to join the army. The little recruit naturally did not respond. Some time after, the father, to his great surprise, was sentenced to a fine of 300 roubles. As the matter had become serious Manela went with his son to Kielce and convinced the Military Commission by ocular evidence that the boy was really only eleven years old. But the Military Commission had no power to absolve him of the fine and advised him to appeal to the District Court, a step which he was unable to take owing to the expense. Thereupon his furniture was seized and sold by auction, and as this did not yield sufficient money the new furniture that he obtained was overtaken by a similar fate. Manela then appealed to the Governor and also to the late Prime Minister, M. Stolypin, but without avail. Ultimately he appealed to the District Court, but three years have now passed and he is still awaiting the Court's decision. In the meantime his son has reached his sixteenth year, but cannot get a passport as he is officially a deserter!" 

⁷ Legal Sufferings 0f the Jews in Russia, p.6. 

⁸ See Note on p.326. 

⁹ A considerable literature has grown up about The Russian pogroms. The standard work is Die Judenpogrome is Russlend (Jüdischer Verlag, Berlin, 1910, 2 vols.), comprising nearly 1000 pages of painful and often gruesome reading, which demands very strong nerves. See also The Russian Government and the Massacres, by E. Semenoff (John Murray, 1907), which proves the complicity of the Government; Russia at the Bar of the American People, edited by Isidore Singer (Funk & Wagnalls, 1904), and Within the Pale, by Michael Davitt (Hurst & Blackett, 1903), the last two dealing mainly with the Kishineff massacres of 1903. 

¹⁰ The Blood Accusation has been refuted by many Christian scholars, notably Prof. H. L. Strack. It has also been condemned as baseless in several Papal Bulls. The Encyclical issued by Innocent IV (1247) and the Report drawn up in 1758 by Cardinal Ganganelli (1ater Clement XIV) are authenticated by cardinal Merry del Val, Papal Secretary of State, in a letter, dated 18th October 1913, to Lord Rothschild. 

¹¹ Professors Jorga and Cuza were openly accused of this charge by the Liberal Minister of Education, M. Haret, in the Rumanian Parliament (Report of the" Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden," 1911, p.31). 

¹² See the Report of the "Hilfsverein," 1911, pp. 28, 29. 

¹³ 21st March 1913. 

¹⁴ The Times, 13th May 1914. 

¹⁵ Jewish Chronicle, 1st and 8th August 1913. 

¹⁶ The Times, 11th June 1914.